Beer culture

A Staffordshire town whose well water made its pale ale better than anyone else's, and which gave brewing a verb — to Burtonise — that is still used in every brewhouse in the world.

The only major beer style with its own written constitution, drunk in 0.2 litre glasses that arrive on a wreath-shaped tray, in a city that has organised its brewing by agreement since the Middle Ages.

A city where the beer, the room it is drunk in and the person who brings it are one institution — and where four old-town houses still brew the beer they serve, a few metres from the table you are sitting at.

Northern Bavaria kept what industrialisation removed everywhere else: village breweries by the hundred, unfiltered beer drawn from wooden casks, malt dried over open beechwood fires, and cellars cut into sandstone that are still working.

Where beer first became an industry — a city that invented porter, brewed it in vats the size of buildings, lost almost all of it, and then rebuilt more breweries than it had in the Victorian era.

The city that turned lager into an institution — a brewing capital with six protected breweries, beer gardens built on top of cooling cellars, and a festival the whole autumn is organised around.

A stretch of farmland south-west of Brussels where beer is still made by leaving it out overnight and letting whatever is in the air ferment it — the last place where that never stopped.

A Bohemian town that dumped its own beer in the street in protest, hired a Bavarian brewer, and in 1842 produced a golden lager that within fifty years had become what most of the world means by the word beer.

A city that treats the pouring of beer as a skill worth training for — where foam is part of the drink, the tap has a lever on its side, and the plainest room in the street may have the best-kept lager in it.

In British and Irish pubs one person buys for the whole group and the obligation circulates — a convention that follows from ordering at the bar rather than at the table.

Cask beer arrives alive and unfinished, and the pub has to settle it, vent it, tap it and sell it within days — which makes a British cellar a small production facility.

In Cologne and Düsseldorf you do not order beer. A Köbes circulates with a tray of small glasses and replaces yours as it empties, until you put your beer mat on top of it.

A few Franconian houses still broach an oak cask by hand and pour by gravity, which gives softer carbonation than any pressurised system.

Oktoberfest does not begin at a time; it begins when the Mayor of Munich drives a tap into the first cask in the Schottenhamel tent at noon and says "O’zapft is!".

Czech bars treat foam as part of the drink rather than as waste, and a side-pull tap lets the person pouring decide how much of it you get.

Bavarian festival and garden beer is sold by the litre, in a handled glass, at a table you share with strangers — three conventions that only make sense together.

A Belgian café serves each beer in that beer’s own glass, and will apologise or refuse rather than substitute — part function, part convention, and worth separating.

A large roofed drinking room built by a brewery at industrial scale, with a band, a kitchen and enough tables that the room itself is the attraction.

A café whose beer list runs to dozens of bottles, each poured into its own branded glass, with the glassware treated as part of the serve rather than as branding.

A Bavarian institution that began as the ground above a brewery’s cooling cellars, where the trees planted to keep the ice cold ended up shading the drinkers.

A Franconian drinking place on the hillside above a brewery’s rock-cut lagering cellar — confusingly, you sit outside, on top of the cellar rather than in it.

A German brewery-tavern: a public room whose beer comes from the brewery that owns it, and in the Rhineland often from a copper you can see from your table.

A pub that brews the beer it sells, in the building it sells it in — the one venue word that does make a claim about where the kettle is.

A pub that is not tied to any brewery and can therefore buy beer from whoever it likes — a claim that appears on signage because for most of British history it was unusual.

The Czech pub: plain rooms, one or two beers, table service, and a tally on a slip of paper that quietly assumes you want another.

A bar attached to a brewery, selling that brewery’s beer at the point it was made — the modern craft sector’s answer to not owning any pubs.

A licensed house, not a bar: a room licensed to sell drink to the public, with a cellar underneath it and a licensee whose trade depends on what is in it.

A pub owned by a brewery and obliged to sell that brewery’s beer — the arrangement that shaped British beer economics for a century and was largely broken up in 1989.

A house in the Upper Palatinate that opens as a pub for a few weeks at a time, serving beer its owner brewed at the village’s communal brewhouse.

Belgium’s brewers take over the Grand-Place in Brussels for a weekend each September — a national trade body’s festival held in a UNESCO world heritage square.

Across northern Europe the biggest and darkest beers of the year are released for winter — a genuinely old seasonal logic that survived into a modern marketing category.

For a few weeks after the hop harvest, brewers use hops that were never dried — a beer that cannot be made at any other time and cannot be shipped far.

The Brewers Association’s festival and competition in Denver — the event that tracked the American craft sector from a few dozen breweries to several thousand.

Munich’s civic festival, which began as a horse race at a royal wedding in 1810 and became the occasion the whole city organises its autumn around.

Munich’s strong beer season, held during Lent, when the city’s breweries release doppelbocks and the halls fill for a second, smaller festival season.

CAMRA’s national beer exhibition, home of the Champion Beer of Britain award, and the model most British beer festivals are built on. It is currently on hiatus.

A lager country with a pub culture inherited from Britain, an unusually strong claim on hop growing, and a serving vocabulary that changes at every state border.

A country with no single beer tradition and an unusual tolerance for beers that would be faults anywhere else — sour, wild, spiced, enormously strong — sold in a café by the bottle, in its own glass, one at a time.

The country that treats pouring beer as a trained skill, where an ordinary neighbourhood bar is expected to keep its lager properly and customers notice when it does not.

Not one beer culture but a dozen regional ones that happen to share a country, held together by an unusually strong local brewing economy and an ingredient tradition that is far younger and far less uniform than the marketing suggests.

A country whose beer identity abroad is one dark beer and one brand, and whose actual market is a lager market with an unusually strong pub culture and a young independent brewing sector.

A market whose products were shaped more directly by tax law than anywhere else on earth, with a serving culture built around the first drink of the evening and an industrial brewing standard that is extremely high.

A Central European brewing tradition transplanted to Latin America in the nineteenth century, which kept a style Austria largely abandoned and built one of the world’s largest brewing industries around it.

Two brewing worlds in one country: an industrial lager sector among the largest in Africa, and a far older sorghum-brewing tradition that is still practised, still ceremonial, and still made mostly by women.

The country that kept a live, unfiltered, unpressurised beer as an everyday format, and built an entire social institution — the pub — around the fact that somebody has to look after it.

A brewing culture destroyed twice — by Prohibition and by consolidation — and rebuilt from below by homebrewers, which is why it is simultaneously the home of the world’s blandest beer and its most experimental.

Thirteen thousand years, and almost everything that decides how beer tastes invented in the last three hundred.

Pale malt, the hydrometer, refrigeration, pure yeast, the crown cap — what brewing was like before each one.

Was IPA invented for India? Did people drink beer because water was unsafe? Not all the answers are no.